She tells the BBC she was drawn to the film - about faith, culture and colonisation - for personal reasons.

It would take a remarkable acting performance to rival Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett on screen.

But that’s exactly what untried child prodigy Aswan Reid has done in her latest movie, critics say.

Barely 11 years old when The New Boy was shot in the dusty South Australian outback in 2022, Reid’s audition was the very first tape the film’s creators looked at.

“He’s absolutely magnetic. We were so lucky to find him,” Blanchett tells the BBC’s Today programme.

“[He’s] a Kiwirrkurra boy from the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia - who had not only never been off Country, he’d never been on a film set. But yet, he learnt more in two days about the film industry than I’d learnt in almost 30 years.”

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    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Reid plays the film’s titular character - a nine-year-old Aboriginal orphan with mysterious supernatural powers, whose arrival at a remote monastery in the dead of night sends the place into turmoil.

    From the mid-1800s until 1970, successive generations of Indigenous children - estimated to be in the tens of thousands - were forcibly removed from their families and cut off from their culture, under policies aimed at assimilation.

    At the age of 11, the Kaytetye man was sent from his home in Alice Springs to a remote missionary-style school run by Benedictine monks in Western Australia.

    Blanchett - who plays a renegade nun - has said she’s long wanted to work with Thornton and when she read the script, she was determined to have it for her production company Dirty Films.

    Originally about a monk and an Indigenous boy, it was Blanchett’s husband and collaborator Andrew Upton who suggested putting a nun in charge of the monastery - a role usually reserved for men.

    And when the film was released there last year, the nation was in the grips of a referendum on the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, which was decisively rejected.

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